Some Thoughts

I admit I’m rather looking forward to the day when Ethan asks me, “Dad, are dragons for real?”

I cannot imagine anyone being so cruel as to say, “No, son. There are no dragons in the world.” That is, unless one immediately follows in a hushed voice with, “…at least not anymore.” Can’t you just see the little guy’s eyes widen, begging for the story of “what happened to all the dragons?” Of course, we ought to look around quite carefully before divulging any part of the story, because someone (though we’re not sure who) either isn’t supposed to know the story, or at least they don’t want another boy to.

A little boy’s imagination and innate seeds of adventure, wonder, courage and conquering need to be watered early and often. Stories of knights and dragons, pirates and explorers, etc. are wonderful preparation, I believe, for the greatest story ever told. Ours is an epic story, with elements factual as well as mythical. By “mythical” I don’t mean false, or made-up, or anything like that. I mean “epic, mysterious, magical.” Yes, we have the facts: we have a time and a place, we have names and we have eye-witness accounts. But there is also something rather wonderfully epic about it all: eternal God became a temporal man, the transcendent Son of God wrapped himself in Immanent flesh, brought us the Truth — indeed, was and is the Truth — died for us, was raised again on the third day, and now sits at the right hand of the Father. (I am not saying there is a “Jesus of history, and a Christ of faith.” What God has joined together, let no man separate asunder.) What we read in Scripture is true — it happened — but there is something magical, something mythical, something wonder-inducing about it all.

Lewis said it best (of course), when he reminded us that, in the story of Christ,

We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘Pagan Christs’: they ought to be there — it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic — and is not the sky itself a myth — shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher. (Lewis, ‘Myth Became Fact’, available in Present Concerns, published 2002 by Eerdmans [update: God in the Dock, published 1994 by Eerdmans]).

I could be wrong, but one of the ways we can prepare young minds to embrace the wonder of Christ along with the facts of Christ is to tell stories about dragons. Besides, how does anyone really know they don’t exist…anymore?